CHAPTER 1

GEOPOLITICS OF DOMINANCE

The White Knights of Chess

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

—Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Cold War in Name, Hot Wars for Real

Because I grew up in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War had a lot to do with how I began to understand geopolitics. Muhammad Ali’s famous riposte to questions about his refusal to be drafted for the war—“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”—was a turning point.

That awakening got me onto the path of better understanding the war and the distortions of the American political and media narrative about the history of the region, then called Indochina. The war shaped many of my fears during my teenage years, as the “domino theory” was used to scare millions into believing that Western imperialism was going to save us from impending catastrophe if the Vietcong and their allies—all people seeking to be free of imperialism—defeated America and its allies. What transpired after the end of the war in 1975 and the reality today of a vibrant and mostly peaceful region have been the complete opposite of what was predicted, exposing the lies of media and politicians alike.

My appreciation and understanding of China and today’s US-China tensions began when I moved to Hong Kong in 1990. This period coincided with China’s rise and the reshaping of the world order. China fascinated me ever since I read books about the revolution and learned, when I was living in Africa, about the support the various liberation movements there received from China. Since then, I have had a front-row seat to what has been the greatest large-scale transformation of a society in history, including the lifting of hundreds of millions out of abject poverty.

But this great human success story also brought about the geopolitical standoff of our time, as the West, led by the US, comes to terms, for the first time in two to three centuries, with the rise of a non-White civilization that appears capable of surpassing it on many fronts. To this day, I am puzzled by how anti-China the West and its media are, with any reasonable discussion of the changes and challenges presented by this transition overwhelmed by xenophobia and even racism. The truth is that Western governments and media refuse to recognize the historical fact that the rise of China is posing a challenge to centuries of Western dominance and White privilege. India’s turn may come next.

The current global tensions arising from the desire of the West to suppress China should make clear that perhaps the grandest forces shaping our lives today are the relationships between countries and the structure of the international order. How countries interact with each other—where they define their interests, where they work together, and where they compete—has huge effects on how those in society live their lives. This runs even deeper in our globalized era: disputes between two powers can have repercussions for someone living on the other side of the world.

Mainstream histories of international relations state that the period since the end of World War II has been a historically unique period of peace. Tensions between the world’s two postwar superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, may have been severe, but they never erupted into open conflict. The end of the Cold War in 1991 then turned the bipolar world into a unipolar one, with the international order led by the United States.

This peace is also credited as the reason the world is now as prosperous as it is. This international system, established and managed by one superpower, has created rules and institutions that have encouraged stability. Clear rules and norms have allowed nations to thrive, their economies to grow, and their populations to get rich.

One can understand why Western scholars take comfort in this narrative, as it places the West at the center of the international system. Even when they recognize the hugely damaging effects of Western imperialism, they can point to the current liberal world order as a meaningful shift away from that imperialism. The claims of peace and a Western rules–based order also act as a subtle warning to others: if anything were to happen to this Western-led system—perhaps due to the rise of a new non-Western challenger—this peace and prosperity may end.

To the rest of the world, however, the Cold War and post–Cold War eras look very different: this period of superpower peace has been anything but peaceful. Since 1945, there have been over 285 armed conflicts involving state and nonstate actors, with a majority of these occurring in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Worse is when the conflicts involve one of the great powers: the Vietnam War, the conflicts in Afghanistan, or the illegal invasion of Iraq.¹

It is true that the world has not faced a global, system-wide conflict on the scale of World War II. But this matters less to the many around the world who still suffer from conflict and oppression—often spurred by the actions of one of the great powers.

White Privilege in Geopolitics

This analytical neglect is part of an international structure that supports and perpetuates the idea of White privilege: an idea that the countries that matter are Western and that the dealings between them should set the norms on how international politics should be managed too. Countries that lie outside this group either need to accept the way things are done or will be classified as a threat and dealt with.

In this chapter, we will focus on the international institutions and organizations that manage the global world order. These are the bodies that discuss important global issues and take actions to resolve them. They are the bodies that set the rules for proper international action, judging who is acting responsible and who threatens international peace and stability. And these are the bodies that, under the pretext of preserving the world order and peace, take punitive actions against those who are deemed to be breaking the rules.

Many examples of these Western alliances to preserve White power exist. One is the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, comprising a cabal of five Anglo-Saxon nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—all bound together by their colonial ties. As Nikolas Kozloff, author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left, notes, the Snowden revelations demonstrated that “some of Britain’s former English-speaking colonies have banded together in a crass effort to take advantage of people of color.”² Despite being an anachronism, Five Eyes has gathered strength in the last few years as its members band together to oppose rising powers such as China. The Five Eyes showcases something unique with regard to White racism and privilege in geopolitics: the existence of a coalition made up solely of the Anglosphere, of which four are White settler communities that created nations through large-scale violence against non-White indigenous populations.

These bodies come together in what is frequently described as the “international rules-based order,” which is often credited for the peace, stability, prosperity, and interconnectedness we see today. Join the system and follow its prescriptions, and you will be accepted as a member of the international community. If you are seen as a threat, your country will be ostracized and punished severely.

The issue is that the countries doing the judging tend to be Western and White. White individuals sit in global leadership positions, bringing their own frameworks and biases to discussions of international importance. Challenges from their peers are seen as honest criticism; challenges from those outside the group are seen as dangerous, uninformed, and threatening.

This means that every non-Western country needs to decide how it will operate in a Western- and White-led world. Do you accept their leadership in the hope of getting support for your own national objectives, even if it means reinforcing an unfair system? Do you try to opt out of the system, only to be ignored and neglected in international affairs? Or do you try to challenge the unfairness of the international system, only to risk punishment from those in charge?

Why Geopolitics Matter

Why do the structures of global geopolitics matter in our discussion of global White privilege?

First of all, global geopolitical structures can have significant effects on people’s lives. They determine whether people need to worry about conflict. They determine whether they can trade with other regions. They determine whether someone might receive assistance when in trouble. And, perhaps most important, they determine whether someone can live largely free of interference from other countries or whether their country will attract unwanted actions by the West. Play it safe like Singapore and you are left alone; be belligerent like Iran and all hell breaks loose.

Second, geopolitics determines what kind of world we live in: a world marked by fairness and equality or one marked by hierarchy and oppression. These geopolitical outcomes then dictate who gets to develop and who does not. The international system has oscillated between equality and hierarchy at different periods of time, and different parts of the system can often be organized on different principles: for example, when nineteenth-century European countries were preening themselves for their respect for sovereign equality and noninterference, they were rampantly engaging in empire building and plunder elsewhere in the world. France is a good example of this supreme hypocrisy.

Finally, we need to understand how geopolitics is played if we are to avoid war. Those working in the field of international relations often say that their main objective is to prevent another massive global great-power conflict on the scale of World War II. And these great-power conflicts often emerge when a challenger to the existing global system emerges.

As other countries such as China and India rise, they pose a potential threat to the existing system.³ Such power transitions run the risk of leading to great-power conflict—which will hurt a great many people. Yet an international system riven with White privilege makes this global conflict more likely, as White people try to protect ill-gotten gains and privileges from people on the rise who want their fair share. Only by rooting out this sense of entitlement born out of White privilege will we be able to transition to a more multipolar world while avoiding the death and destruction that characterized the first half of the twentieth century.

Sovereign Equality: Not for the “Uncivilized”

The international system is nominally predicated on the idea of sovereign equality—the idea that every state is equal to each other and should be allowed to conduct its domestic affairs without interference. Also known as the “Westphalian system,” these norms supposedly grew out of Europe due to a desire to end the constant religious conflicts among the continent’s various kingdoms. This system was not globally applied for several more centuries, as European countries practiced imperialism and oppression overseas while proclaiming equality at home. Following the end of World War II, the success of the decolonization movement in the twentieth century, and the establishment of the United Nations, the idea of sovereign equality—that no country will have dominion over another—was universally applied.

But alongside the idea of sovereign equality is another concept that has had much more pernicious effects on the international system: the idea of the “civilized state.” This idea determined who would receive the full set of rights and legal protections afforded to sovereign entities. Those states deemed uncivilized would not be protected: actions against them would not be deemed “beyond the pale.”

We can see how this concept worked in the time of empire. Much of the world was deemed uncivilized, and thus could be invaded and conquered by Western countries. Long-standing cultures and societies, such as those in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, were deemed to be uncivilized because they did not conform to the Western norm, and thus were taken over and plundered in order to build the economies of the West.

Even countries that were considered civilized enough to escape being conquered were not considered to be wholly equal to the mostly European countries that made up the West. The independent countries of Latin America—perhaps due to their former history of European colonization or due to the “protection” of the United States under the Monroe Doctrine—were never included in any of the formal nineteenth-century European empires. Yet all countries were subject to constant political and economic interference from the West—the United States, their erstwhile protector, prime among them throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴

Japan is an excellent example of the power of the idea of “international civilization.” With the defeat of China during the Opium Wars and then Commodore Perry’s forced opening of Japan in 1853, the country realized that it needed to quickly model itself after the West if it wanted to be protected from foreign invasion. The country speedily embarked on a “modernization” program, copying Western ideas, cultures, techniques, and even modes of dress. The goal was to be taken seriously as a “civilized” power and thus allowed the full range of actions and protections afforded to European countries.

This drive culminated in war several times. The first was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, where Japan’s victory over Russia led it to be seen as a major power. The second was Japan’s involvement in World War I, where its cooperation with the Entente Powers resulted in concessions at the Versailles negotiations (at the expense of China). Finally, and most devastatingly, a drive to secure resources and build its own global empire led to Japan’s invasions throughout East Asia in the run-up to and during World War II. The reputation of the Japanese took a beating, and they were dismissed by the Western powers, who ironically were themselves illegal occupants and plunderers of the lands the Japanese foolishly sought to take.

The Civilized State and the Rogue State

The idea of civilized and uncivilized nations was supposed to end with decolonization and the establishment of the United Nations. But the idea persists today, seen in some of the key terms used to describe countries in the international system.

One is the idea of the “rogue state”: a country that flouts the rules of the international system and poses a grave threat to international peace and stability. Such a state needs to be controlled and, at worst, put in line, through force if necessary. Several states around the world have been slapped with this label: Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, and all by White Western powers. Almost all have been hit with some form of sanctions; some have even been invaded in the name of promoting human rights, democracy, and global peace.

The West has supported military interventions in order to oust leaders it feels are threats to world peace: Iraq, Libya, and Syria are the most recent examples. These interventions have served to create further instability, often making the problem worse. Disingenuous justifications for interventions and even invasions have become part of the Western discourse around the “responsibility to protect”: the idea that sovereignty is conditional upon state governments protecting the lives of their citizens. When a state fails in this regard, its sovereignty no longer needs to be respected, and punitive actions can be taken against it.

This is not to deny that the leaders of these countries and other “rogue states” are innocent. All are guilty to various degrees of mistreating their populations and even mismanaging their economies, but much of their woes are also a result of years of Western intervention. Examples include the complex situations in Myanmar, Iran, and Venezuela. But their being deemed beyond the pale ended up encouraging actions against them that have led to demonstrably worse outcomes.

It is also clear that the Western powers are willing to overlook equally terrible measures on the part of countries and leaders who do not upset the status quo. It is common knowledge around the world that the West has not only turned a blind eye to authoritarianism, corruption, and other human rights abuses when conducted by an ostensible ally, but even aided and abetted them when it served Western economic and strategic goals: from anti-Communist dictatorships in Latin America (the military juntas in Guatemala and Argentina, General Pinochet in Chile—all supported by the CIA) and Southeast Asia during the Cold War to states in the Middle East critical to “regional stability.”⁵

The inverse of the idea of the rogue state is the “responsible stakeholder”: a country that understands its place in the international order and contributes resources to its support. These are the countries that pay their dues to international organizations, that provide forces for peacekeeping, and that play their part in sustaining the international rules-based order. This requires accepting the international system as it is, including which countries lead it.

Being considered a responsible stakeholder can be quite lucrative. Explicit support for the international system might give a country some niche role within it, expanding its influence in the Western countries that run it. That conferred legitimacy, in turn, might be used to serve its own national interests.

This is not hypothetical. Non-Western countries spend millions of dollars on lobbying campaigns in Western capitals to prove that they are truly responsible and thus are integral parts of the existing international system. By flattering the West, they potentially stand to benefit. It reinforces the notion of White Is Right and delivers White privilege across the world. Hong Kong was a friend of the West as long as it was able to walk that tightrope, but that became very difficult once it became a pawn in US-China geopolitics and was therefore punished.

But to be responsible stakeholders, countries also need to contribute to an existing rules-based order that they had no hand in creating, and they have little to no ability to change the rules to account for their interests. In the end, the countries that set the rules will remain the same: the large Western and White countries.

Yet choosing not to take part leads to lectures about being “irresponsible.” This may not come with any material consequences (unlike the designation of being a rogue state), but it means not being invited to sit at the table with the other major powers and being sidelined.

So, rising countries are in a bind: take part in the system in order to be invited to the head table, yet have no influence once you get there; or ignore the system and be neglected.

International Leadership: Who Runs the World?

On October 9, 2020, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”⁶

The person accepting the award was WFP’s executive director, David Beasley. Before joining WFP, he was perhaps best known for being a one-term governor of South Carolina in the late 1990s and for his (laudable) efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House. According to his biography, he spent the years since his election defeat in 1996 “working with high-profile leaders and on-the-ground program managers in more than 100 countries, directing projects designed to foster peace, reconciliation and economic progress.”

With no offense to Beasley and his likely sincere efforts to help those around the world, one wonders why he was nominated to be executive director. The simplest answer is his connection to the then US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, herself a former governor of South Carolina.

Beasley is the latest in a long line of US administrators of WFP. The executive directors have been American since 1992. In fact, only one executive director of WFP since its inception has come from a non-Western country: Francisco Aquino, who served from 1968 to 1976.

There are a number of unwritten rules governing who gets to run these major international institutions. For example, there’s the long-standing agreement that the World Bank is run by an American and the IMF is run by a European. Thus, although Christine Lagarde from the IMF is lauded as a champion of women’s rights, her activism rings hollow when it is a fact that no non-White woman was even considered for the post. She is a beneficiary of global White privilege.

When International Leadership Means Western Leadership

Major global bodies are often led by Westerners. When they aren’t, then the bar is set very high, and they are often the subject of attacks by Western nations and experts, as Tedros Adhanom, who was elected director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017, has found out in his attempts to grapple with a once-in-a-century pandemic and the constant criticisms of WHO’s decisions. Many of the world’s most prominent economic groups—such as the Group of 7 (G7) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—are dominated by Western countries, with only a few non-Western members.

Non-White political leaders, too, are of the subject of ridicule and constant criticism, with hardly any balanced reporting in the Western media. In the past, this included Lee Kuan Yew (the first prime minister of Singapore). Today it includes President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who transformed a country that experienced genocide into a successful country in the space of two decades. Yet White leaders who have committed international crimes, such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair, are given a free pass and even rehabilitated. This is White privilege at work too.

Membership in organizations like the G7 and OECD were originally justified on the basis of economic development: both were meant to involve the world’s largest economies. However, with the rise of other countries, membership is now offered on the basis of “democratic values,” justified along Western lines.

When international institutions are set up along Western lines, see the world through Western framings, and are led by Westerners, one should not be surprised if their actions, advice, and prescriptions follow Western framings as well. One should also not be surprised that those who then appear to be the “most qualified” are White, establishing a permanent “ruling class” when it comes to global and elite institutions.

The international bodies that most exemplify this institutional form of discrimination are the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions were set up to manage the global economy, especially in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.

However, these institutions have largely pursued an economic development platform that promotes free markets and deregulation, often at the expense of living conditions on the ground. Developing countries, faced with an economic crisis—oftentimes not of their own making—have been forced to enact sweeping and drastic policy reforms at the insistence of the IMF. These Structural Assistance Programmes were based on the ideas of the Washington Consensus: that economies must be market driven, with reduced public sectors and limited assistance. These reforms were often hugely damaging, destroying standards of living and demolishing trust in political and economic institutions, including in many of the fledgling democracies seen after the fall of the Soviet Union.⁷

Trade agreements—at least those pursued by the West—often include other priorities that are meant to benefit Western companies and business interests. For example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) did not just include efforts to reduce barriers to trade but also forced many countries to agree to tighten up their protections for intellectual property, open up their service sectors to foreign firms, and allow Western companies to sue governments in court to overturn regulations they did not like. TPP was not popular in many of the countries involved in negotiations, but in the end, the promise of better access to the United States was enough for them to bite the bullet.

By contrast, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), agreed on by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, is a much slimmer document, focusing primarily on reducing trade barriers between the countries involved. It does not involve itself with intellectual property, investor disputes, service sectors, or government support, yet this has now led to the creation of the world’s largest trading bloc.⁸

The Rules-Based Order: Sanctions and Military Interventions

The final aspect of the rules-based international order is what happens when a country is deemed to have broken it. The bodies that make those judgments and that ultimately apply the punishment are almost entirely Western.

For example, the UN Security Council remains the pinnacle of the international security apparatus. This body can decide whether or not to take action against any particular member of the international community. Yet it is also a product of the postwar era. Its permanent five members are the victors of World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China. Three out of the five are clearly Western; four out of the five are White. China remains the only non-Western, non-majority-White country on the council. These five member countries have veto rights, and they thus control the debate at the United Nations.

There have been efforts to expand the permanent members of the council. Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, and South Africa have all agreed to support one another’s bids for membership, yet for various reasons, none have gone through.

Countries that are deemed to be in violation of the rules can be made subject to a range of punishments. Yet when a UN resolution to call for an end to racism, racial intolerance, and xenophobia (something that most countries are guilty of, to varying degrees) came up at the UN at the end of 2020, only fourteen countries voted no. These included the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada—four members of the Five Eye Alliance—who are typically the first to call out others on human rights and freedoms and even intervene.⁹

The most serious of these punishments is military intervention, which has been implemented throughout the Middle East in much of the twenty-first century. In Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Western countries—often without formal authorization from the United Nations, supposedly the main body to decide these things—went ahead to oust leaders they felt were threatening to the international order. In all of these cases, the intervention served to make matters worse, causing instability, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and violence that persists today.

Military interventions remain controversial; even within the Western bloc, countries were sharply divided as to whether the interventions were justified. It should be noted, however, that they were not controversial enough to spur Western countries to denounce the United States or the United Kingdom as “rogue states” for their interventions in Iraq or Libya. None called for labeling those interventions as war crimes.

As military interventions have become politically unfeasible internationally and domestically, Western countries have increasingly turned to economic sanctions as their punishment of choice. Western governments and organizations have turned to the reckless use of unilateral sanctions, such as the US sanctions against Iran or the European Union sanctions against Cambodia.

Sanctions are generally seen to be a less violent, yet still punitive, mechanism to enforce international rules. It is important to note, however, that the effectiveness of sanctions is entirely dependent on their ability to inflict pain on a population: the idea is that sanctions will make the operation of society and the economy so painful that a government will be forced to compromise on key issues. An example of a country hounded by the West and punished in ways that resulted in massive suffering is Iran. No Western country has openly apologized or even acknowledged that tens of thousands of children—yes, children—have died in Iran due to sanctions. White privilege allows a Western government to get away with these large-scale horrors.

Thus the way we judge sanctions depends on whether or not they actually achieve their objectives. The international sanctions against Iran may have succeeded in bringing it to the negotiating table over its supposed nuclear arms program, but did so by inflicting a great deal of pain on ordinary Iranians, who did not have access to key goods. In addition, sanctions distort the economy, making access to even permitted goods more difficult.

Sanctions that don’t work are crimes against humanity, because they inflict pain with no benefit. If inflicted against a White population, sanctions would be demonized and even unthinkable. One can’t argue that the ends justify the means if the policy doesn’t even achieve the ends. The US-led round of sanctions against Iran, begun in 2020, proves this point: the sanctions are clearly being enacted to punish a regime (by cruelly punishing innocent citizens) Washington does not like, with no real attempt to achieve any kind of mutually beneficial arrangement with Tehran. White privilege allows the West to remain collectively silent on these crimes against humanity and not to be held accountable to the global community.

Sanctions are now increasingly targeted against specific leaders and policymakers who are believed to be responsible for certain actions. But even if you accept the premise that wider economic pain will not result from these targeted sanctions, this approach reveals the limitations of sanctions as a policy instrument. There is no evidence or theory that explains how sanctions on already isolated leaders will lead to changes in policy—meaning that they are being implemented as punishment, as a warning to others, and in a desire to showboat a fake morality.

Conclusion

When considering how a post-Western world may look like and be run, it is important to look at and learn from examples that are working and not part of the Western world’s prescriptions on geopolitical issues. Here are two examples that provide a pointer to how other models work in the geopolitical front.

Looking for Geopolitical Lessons: ASEAN

In discussions of international politics, experts and commentators largely ignore non-Western institutions when looking for lessons about peace, cooperation, and international security. Only experts attached to Western think tanks are invited to comment on and analyze events and developments in the international system.

One glaring example is the longtime ignorance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. As Kishore Mahbubani notes in his book The ASEAN Miracle, ASEAN has an amazing track record of fostering international cooperation and peace in one of the most multicultural and multiethnic regions in the world.¹⁰ Southeast Asia includes many of the world’s largest countries, whose populations follow very different religions and have very different histories. Also, as a region nestled between China and the United States, it is at risk of having its divisions exploited by nearby great powers.

Despite this, the region has been not only peaceful but largely unified in its foreign policy. ASEAN has not fallen apart, nor are there pressing disagreements or disputes between its member countries. The prospect of armed conflict between the members of ASEAN is nigh unthinkable.

Mahbubani notes how the West has dismissed the value of institutions outside the West. He observes that the European Union has long been held up as the model for regional integration, whereas other models such as ASEAN and the African Union have been dismissed as not going far enough.

Even now, with the European Union beset by internal differences and divisions, ASEAN’s success in keeping a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual region at peace has gone overlooked. The reason commonly cited for ASEAN’s limitations is its culture of consensus building, nonintervention, and respect for internal sovereignty. Yet ASEAN appears to have truly bolstered the power of Southeast Asia as a collective body, maintaining an independent position on key issues between the United States and China. By contrast, the European Union continues to struggle to define an independent role for itself within the Western bloc.

Looking for Geopolitical Lessons: AIIB

Countries are made to jump through hoops in order to join the important international bodies. China needed to make significant changes to its internal policies in order to join the World Trade Organization, yet today countries claim that China did not do enough and must do more.

The furor over the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is an example of how an institution created to challenge White economic dictates and power will be treated as somehow illegitimate.¹¹

AIIB was proposed by Beijing in 2012 as an alternative to Western-led organizations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. It was never presented as a competitor to these organizations, but instead as an organization to complement existing development institutions.

Many countries throughout Asia were willing to support such an initiative. Even Western countries in Europe were open to supporting a new addition to the development finance landscape.

However, one country was strongly opposed: the United States, which saw AIIB as a threat to the existing Western- and US-led development finance institutions. Washington engaged in an international behind-the-scenes campaign to lobby governments to reject AIIB. Some countries agreed, Japan prime among them. Many other countries ignored the United States, much to the chagrin of Washington.

The irony is that Beijing developed AIIB in response to long-standing calls for it to become a responsible stakeholder. Throughout the 2000s, China was continually lectured by Washington to start playing a greater role in world affairs and to support an international order that fostered international peace and stability.¹²

AIIB was intended to be an effort in that regard: a new development institution that would show that China was willing to use its newfound economic power to improve global well-being. Yet when Beijing actually did offer to act as a responsible stakeholder, Washington strongly disagreed. The overarching objective of maintaining Western economic power is simply unable to tolerate such a proposition.

It turns out that by responsible stakeholder, the United States and its allies in fact meant that Beijing should accept the US-led order and contribute to its operation without fundamentally challenging the existing power structure. To join their world order, China must play by their rules and be subservient.

The narrative has, of course, shifted in recent years. Now, China’s presence in international organizations—even ones set up by the West—is seen as a fundamental institutional challenge. China, as a major economic power, contributes a great deal to such organizations as the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Yet now an increasing number of Western commentators see these organizations as “tainted” by Chinese influence, to the point where they think that the West should not even take part in them anymore.

It is undoubtedly true that China’s investment in these institutions is not wholly selfless: Beijing has probably made the calculus that its interests are suited by playing a large role in these international institutions.

Yet all major powers feel this way. The United States feels that its interests are served by being a major contributor to these organizations, and in fact feels that its contributions should give it a much larger say in how these organizations are run. China’s attitude toward these organizations is not unique, nor is it indicative of behavior much different from that of other major powers.

Fighting Global White Privilege in Geopolitics

How can we fight structural White privilege in the area of global geopolitics?

One major avenue would be to recognize the successes of other regions in preserving peace and prosperity. The West is not the only region to have had decades of peace between its members: East Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa have also seen decades of interstate peace. They have lessons worth taking seriously as we try to chart a new path for global geopolitics. These successes also challenge the need for a single, powerful “global policeman”: a title often claimed by White Western major powers and led by the US.

International institutions should also be humbler in their prescriptions. The track record of these global bodies is decidedly mixed, whether in terms of peacekeeping, global economic management, or fostering development. Rather than assume that Western-based framings are the best way to understand global issues, these international bodies need to elevate non-Western voices and examine whether their suggestions would work in non-Western contexts.